Pragmatic is an aspect of communication that deals with how people use language in real-life situations. It’s a concept that’s been widely used in the fields of psychology, sociology and philosophy. The word pragmatic has also been applied to business, politics and even art. It’s a way of looking at the world around you and making choices based on what will get you the results you want.
Pragmatists believe that something is true only in so far as it works, and they are therefore more willing to adapt their ideas than people who adhere strictly to abstract and idealistic principles. They are also less likely to rely on the authority of precedents in decision-making and prefer to base their decisions on a balance of costs and benefits. In the field of psychotherapy, pragmatism has been applied to a number of techniques, including cognitive behavioral therapy and transactional analysis.
The field of experimental pragmatics developed in the 1970s as psychologists, both those studying developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, began to explore how people understood the meaning of their utterances. This was a departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. Some critics within the discipline of linguistics and psychology were skeptical that it was possible to scientifically study pragmatics, and at one point the common refrain was that “pragmatics is the wastebasket of linguistics.”
While it’s true that some scholars view pragmatics as more of a philosophical project than an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation, there are also those who see it as an important component in a theoretical framework for understanding how people communicate, and others who focus on its interaction with grammar. In addition, there are those who view pragmatics as a subset of a more comprehensive approach to communication called Conversational Pragmatics.
A defining feature of this approach is the notion of a speaker’s intention. In contrast to Gricean Pragmatics, which deals with illocutionary force, Conversational Pragmatics uses the idea of the speaker’s plan as the main source of additional facts that supplement conventional meaning. In other words, the speaker’s intentions and goals drive what is said, rather than a consideration of the audience’s needs or expectations.
The implication of this approach is that the boundaries between Semantics and Pragmatics are porous. A number of scholars have argued that, for example, a description of a person or object is not necessarily a referential expression. Instead, the semantic meaning of the phrase is the object or person being referred to. This approach is similar to the work of Donnellan.
In the context of teaching, incorporating pragmatics into classroom instruction is a great way to help students understand the real-life use of language and how it differs from what they might learn in a textbook. Pragmatic lessons can be tied in with content from a textbook or can stand on their own as an independent learning activity. This month’s Teacher’s Corner will explore some of the benefits of pragmatic instruction and offer some resources to get you started.
